


Who is Left Beef?

by Scienda



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Internet humor, Mysterious Dancer, Really it's a lot of snark, So Much Snark, mostly in the asides, so many references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27213529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scienda/pseuds/Scienda
Summary: There's this video of a flash mob doing Thriller at Gotham University. So, who is that attractive dancer to "Michael's" left?
Comments: 3
Kudos: 43





	Who is Left Beef?

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Stop! It's Fanon Time.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16730115) by [lurkinglurkerwholurks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkinglurkerwholurks/pseuds/lurkinglurkerwholurks). 



> So, I dashed this off fairly quickly - spelling and grammar should be mostly right, pacing and plot issues are my own

The video came to Carly’s attention only because a flash mob in Gotham was like a flash flood in the Sahara – possible, but it just never happened (not like the Gobi, that far from water? That’s impossible). It made sense, of course, what with all the strange and bizarre psychopaths that routinely terrorized Gotham’s streets. Still, here was a flash mob, in Gotham, doing a pretty respectable take on _Thriller_.

Naturally the absolute unit dancing to the left of “Michael” gathered a great deal of attention. And why shouldn’t he: tall, stacked, shoulders for days, solid moves (Jagger wishes he moved like this). That white streak in his bangs . . . that’s pure style and attitude, baby, like no one else. What other name could possibly be granted such a specimen but Left Beef. It’s the internet, what are you going to do?

Then the video stayed in the viral rounds, achieving a sort of constant but low level presence on image board, forums, and social media. Instead of referencing, it became referenced. Especially the one section where several of the dancers (not Left Beef, others) managed to fall out of step with the rest of the mob. It was pretty conspicuous, and how did it take them almost 12 seconds to figure out they were out of sync? Seriously, you’d think the fact _everybody_ else was moving in the opposite direction would have been a clue. It became an image meme for utter cluelessness; Imgur was in love.

The video stayed, got uploaded to site after site, re-uploaded again and again and again. And always with mentions of Left Beef and the Bumblers. Heh, band name. The point, though, is it stuck around. So people started digging into it, its background, who was involved, but mostly Who Is Left Beef? Thirsty thirsty watchers wanted to know – all of them hoped he was single, the girls hoped he was straight (the boys . . . not so much).

The mystery of Who is Left Beef took on its own sort of momentum, gravitas. It wasn’t like asking about DB Cooper, there was actual crime in that one and actual government agencies trying to figure it out. Someone started a subreddit, r/leftbeef, dedicated to trying to figure it out. The number of people working on it grew.

Then there was the pandemic, and oh so many bored and highly skilled people with nothing to do. The clues really started rolling in then: probably a student at Gotham University, but not an athlete (with a body like that, why not? But someone had gone through all GU’s sports teams, then the local semi-pro teams with no luck). Despite the white streak, he had to under 30 (fortunately for the panting hordes, he had to be over 18 by now).

It had been a couple of years since the video was originally posted. In that time Carly has moved from being an exhausted master’s candidate to having published her thesis on graph theory and n-tuples. And now the schools were mostly closed, no need for adjunct professors or extra bodies in tutoring centers. She saw the video again, only this time the caption asking Who is Left Beef peaked her curiosity. Well, it wasn’t like she had much else to occupy her time. And all that research and networking during her master’s program left her with an . . . interesting set of contacts.

Still, it was a mystery to occupy her time. So she started her own investigation, studiously ignoring all the previous data to form her own conclusions. And promptly ran into a brick wall. Oh, she managed to recreate most of the previous conclusions: student, non-athlete, 18-30 years old, access to real money (ragged though they were, his costume had started as seriously good clothes). Carly made the semi-logical jump that Left Beef had to be a member of Gotham’s wealthy and elite society. That narrowed the pool of possibilities severely. But unless one of Gotham’s high society was also a secret master of disguise (yea, right, like that was happening), not one of them was the answer.

In desperation, Carly took a few high quality stills of Left Beef and ran them through a de-aging program. She was thinking that maybe looking through all the relevant yearbooks would provide some forward momentum; after all, if he was a Gotham native, he probably would show up in one of them. And yes, thank you very much, she was perfectly aware of what happens when you combine probabilities with probabilities: stats was a suck class, but she had passed.

She never got around to looking at the yearbooks. Impossible as it seemed, if you colored in his bangs, young Left Beef looked exactly like Jason Peter Todd Wayne. Like clones or doppelgangers level matching (and in this world, you couldn’t rule those out). But that was impossible, it couldn’t be him. He was dead. Had been for several years now, the how was a bit vague but there had definitely been a funeral and everything. Still, Left Beef and Jason were almost identical.

She posted her thoughts to r/leftbeef and went to bed.

Hours later, when she checked her e-mail again, her inbox was stuffed and bouncing new messages. A quick skim of the new content only turned up more people convinced she was right: Left Beef was Jason Todd. Carly blinked, did a search and confirmed Jason Todd was still dead. Left Beef was Jason Todd was **dead**.

Conspiracy theories exploded over r/leftbeef; most of them focused on why Jason Todd would fake his own death. The suggestions were outlandish, everything from joining a super-secret spy organization (he was _fifteen_! What sort of skills could he possibly have had?) to murdered by a psychopath (just . . . what?!) to lizard people from Mars trying to take over the world (again with the lizard people; give it a rest!). A few suggested a clone or a doppelganger. One particularly absurd suggestion was that the Batman used a hot spring to bring Jason back to life to be trained as an assassin.

The entire furor made Carly even more curious. She actually did spend a week looking through the yearbooks, but no one other than Jason really matched. She scoured the last few years of the Society Page of the Gotham Gazette: nothing.

At her wit’s end, she conceded she was going to need help. If she was going to break down and call in specialists, might as well start at the top: DelphiB. Delphi was mysterious known quantity in certain online circles. It was said that if you needed information, on anything at all, Delphi could get it. Proof of Delphi’s near miraculous research skills wasn’t hard to find. What Delphi had wanted in exchange was often less clear. Rumor suggested it varied from person to person, never something the asker couldn’t afford to give or do, but also never light enough to encourage trivial questions.

Still, Carly _had_ to know now. She spent over an hour agonizing over the e-mail, assembling everything she had found into a coherent report. With no little trepidation she hit send.

Delphi responded in less than fifteen minutes: don’t know, don’t care, get a hobby.

What.

No, seriously, what?! Everything Carly heard said Delphi always accepted requests, responding with a price. Could that price be something the supplicant wasn’t willing to part with, yes; actually refuse to look into something? Carly checked if the Gobi was flooded. It wasn’t.

Maybe she’s missed something. She went back and read the message again:

> From: [DelphiB@clock.tours](mailto:DelphiB@clock.tours)  
>  To: [JephsonC@zerodrop.org](mailto:JephsonC@zerodrop.org)
> 
> Subject: Left Beef
> 
> Carly,  
>  I don’t know who Left Beef is.  
>  I don’t care who Left Beef is.  
>  You need to get a better hobby than obsessing over some random person.  
>  Believe me, you’re much better off dropping this. Something tells me that if you  
>  keep on digging into this, you’ll be getting a visit from a thoroughly unpleasant man  
>  in black. Or worse, a woman dressed the same way.  
>  I’m not going to charge you for this even though I probably should.  
>  -DelphiB

Nope. Short, to the point, unequivocal. If Delphi was telling her to let it go, it was probably long past time to do just that. It hurt, though, stepping away from something that had been her waking focus for nearly a month now.

It was probably going to be at least a few months before any of the schools started holding classes again. Hmm, that Nightwing fellow that’s always running around town is pretty good looking. Wonder if he’s single . . . .

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I know, ending's a bit weak; I never know how to end stuff . . . .


End file.
